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jammy2211 on 05 February 2009
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HappySqurriel said:
jammy2211 said:
Are people seriously saying that ambition has no correlation to costs?

To draw up a quick comparison, take a game like Burnout Paradise. It has a vast, open racing world. Furthermore it has seamless online intergration that can be accessed without any hassle at the click of a button, great physics etc. It's clearly a cut above most of what EA have procuded on the Wii. Then you look at stuff like Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Battlefield: Bad Company, with voice acting, open worlds, just ambition in general. When you're trying to make a game like this, it's going to cost more, of course it is.

IT's no surprise to me that a game like Boom Blox or EA Party of MySims or NERF-Strike cost a third of the price to produce, aside from graphics there's still alot of things they're doing to cut costs.

I'm by no means saying that HD assets and graphics arn't upping the costs, but when you're comparing Boom Blox and NERF-Strike to Dead Space and Burnout Paradise, no matter what system you put them on the latter are going to cost more.

How "ambitious" a game is, is directly related to how much a game costs and you could consider the visual improvement that goes along with HD game development to be an increase in "ambition" of the project ...

Basically, suppose that MySims cost $2 to $4 Million to develop for the Wii. To take full advantage of the graphical capabilities of the HD consoles and produce a similar game would (probably) boost the cost of development to somewhere between $6 and $12 Million. At the same time a more "Ambitious" game like Grand Theft Auto built from the ground up for the Wii would probably cost $10 to $20 Million to develop, and similar projects on the HD consoles are hitting $40 to (over) $100 Million to develop.

 

 And where did you pull those 'figures' from, a legitimate and reliable source? OR your arse?

 All I'm saying is even if you ignore the additional cost of graphics, and just look at what the games is trying to acheive from a gameplay / scope stand-point, you'd expect it to cost more. At the end of the day, creating a game where you throw a ball at some blocks doesn't cost as much as a huge open world racing sim with seamlessly intergrated online. Ignore graphics and you'd still be looking at more costs.

 Most Wii games, 'average' Wii games, are cheap because they're cheap games. Sure enough if they tried to make a GTA or MGS on the Wii it'd still cost less then HD consoles, but one third the cost? I doubt it.